Would I be strong enough to keep my faith through the end times?

There is a story in the lives of the saints of a deacon and a priest who were in a quarrel, and the authorities came to take the priest to be martyred. On the way to his martyrdom the deacon said, Father, forgive me, let us be at peace. The priest hardened his heart, and it says the grace, the spirit of martyrdom, left him and went to the deacon, and the priest denied Christ.

We see something similar with St Peter, who said, I'll go to prison for you, I will not deny you, and Christ said, watch out, because you will. The temptations of the end times are such that unless the grace of the Holy Spirit upholds us, we will not be able to endure on our own. Look at your life now: we constantly lose our peace under normal stressors. A lot of times we don't even have the grace to handle our own life.

What makes us think we're going to enter the most diabolical time in human history and be thriving on our own? Unless God gives us the grace, we will deny Christ. I never want to be presumptuous like Peter and say, even if everybody else denies you, I will not. I have a deep sense of my own weakness, and I fully believe that unless God gives me the grace, I can't even make it through my day-to-day.